Month: July 2024
The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles
~for Chall Gray and the Proprietors of Little Jumbo
by Eric Steineger
Last night, I remember a bottle of pleasant strangers. Sitting around a wooden table on a ship. Overhead, a bulb swung with the waves, cards slipped onto the floor. It was stormy. A green parrot with an eyepatch repeated the word Damn through its cage. There was Teddy Roosevelt in spectacles, bourbon in hand, regaling the group with his hunt. Alice Waters nodding, talked sustainability. And Lucille Clifton wrote in her notebook, her left hand holding the table like a soothsayer. Solange spoke jazz and the allure of Houston in June. These were the faces and a couple from Barbados with dazzling teeth when someone asked, “Mr. Charles, what do you do?” I mentioned getting back to Little Jumbo where the creature in the corner makes me feel at home. At this point, the pot was huge, and nobody spoke to me after that, but I felt like Solange and I were on the same wavelength. With Waters gone, with Clifton and Solange singing, Teddy snoring face down, one hand in the ice, the other on his binoculars, I played his hand. The couple undazzling, rose to shake the parrot’s cage. “Mr. Charles, what’s next?” someone asked, breaking the unspoken rule. “Well,” I said, looking around the table. “We’re in the last act, let’s divvy up the pot.” “Sold,” said Waters returning with a baguette and wine. Not sure how long we ate, but it was late and when Clifton stood to read her poem, the sea.
Eric Steineger lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee. For ten years, he was the Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review, and his creative work has been featured in such places as Waxwing, The Night Heron Barks, Asheville Poetry Review, and Rattle: The Poets Respond. His manuscript, Curtain Call, was recently a finalist for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. When he is not teaching, he can be found at home with his daughter and his Great Pyrenees, Evie.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles”? by Mike Itaya (After Jurassic Park) Day 1: Bad Day at Badlands Snakewater, Montana. I have poisoned the Velociraptor dig. I’ve been exposed as a paleontological fraud. Ellie left with Hammond in his helicopter – with Hammond’s hand in her lap. The graduate interns (even Hannalore, the well-hootered townie) hot-wired the department van and boogied. These are the things they took: hard booze, my pet weasel, Evinrude, two bushels of Yukon Gold Potatoes, and my self-respect. Day 2: Leftovers A catalog of what remained: Ellie’s horrific homemade sorghum sundries. One case of non-alcoholic beer. A scattergun for the coyotes. A fuckton of regret. Day 6: Cookie Monster I ate all of Ellie’s cookies and barricaded myself inside the shithouse, where someone had written “Alan Grant is a Jurassic Jerk” on the wall. Weeks before, there was a dartboard of my face in the staff lounge. I’d pay a lot of money to never see that face again. Day 8: Because Reasons Dr. Sattler left because there was – quote – “no future here with me.” Day 9: Dick’s Donuts I walk to Rattlesnake Lake. To my unluck, no venomous snake bites me. In town, everything is closed except for Dick’s Donuts. I have a hankering for donut holes. The drive-thru is open, but they refuse to serve me because I am not in a car. Day 12: Velociraptor “A man destined to change the face of paleontology.” That’s what they once said about me. I remember the day I “found” the female Velociraptor – the radius and ulna and femur. Without a discovery, Hammond would have withdrawn his money. Ellie and I would’ve retreated to our separate research facilities. The dig would be finished. So would our life together. Day 14: Scrambler In Ellie’s absence, I find a fiefdom of rats nestled in a derelict pair of her undies. “Time to get scrambled,” I say, and blast them with my scattergun. Day 16: Still Here I woke next to a spent campfire. I was alive. It was a shame I lived with to that day. Day 17: Dear Alan Half-crazed with horniness, I fell into the site of our dig. I’ve consumed enough non-alcoholic beer to kill a lesser man. I was alone save for the ruin of a thousand scrambled rats. In an act of dwindling bravery, I entered the trailer Ellie and I shared. I felt like a ghost, haunting the rot of my former life. On the bed, there was a note, in which Ellie accounted for her brightening future, the arc of her days without me. Alan, our unborn son will never know that you didn’t want him – or that I no longer can be with you – because I will never tell him your name. Back on the day I staged the Velociraptor skeleton, I remember the way Ellie looked, the way that Ellie looked at me. Her face softened, and the mapped worries – about funding, our relationship, our standing in the world – smoothed behind the hazy light of morning which I then mistook for luck. Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears in New Orleans Review, BULL, and The Offing. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant”? I first heard the “scrambled” rat phrase from a friend during a trip to New Orleans. We were drinking at an outdoor bar when a frisky rodent familiarized itself with another patron’s pair of open-toed shoes. Long story short, Michael’s phrase entered my lexicon and has never left. by Tim Raymond In which the psychologist asks me what 2 and 7 have in common. I don’t know, I say to him, because the question is too big. He said the IQ component of this thing would start easy and get complicated later. But doctor, it’s always too complicated. Depending on how you draw them, the 2 and 7 can both act as hooks, or perhaps baskets if you flipped them over. They are made of two lines each. If you write them, you can do so completely without your pencil ever leaving the paper. Ah yes, and they are divisible only by themselves and the number 1, which is what a prime number is, unless I’m mistaken. I can’t remember. I took Calculus in high school and got an A in it and then like 30% on the math portion of the GRE. Once upon a time I was published in Prime Number Magazine, a story called “Wounds,” in which all the different characters list their ailments. I didn’t at the time know I was autistic. Anyway, autism isn’t an ailment, as you know. It’s a beautiful ripe peach on a limb near my aunt’s house where I almost drowned in the pool one summer. Doctor, it’s 2 because I’m closer to that many genders than 1. And 7 because that’s how many fingernails I paint because 70% of the time I feel closer to female than male, even though male is how I’ve lived my life. And still mostly live it, I guess. I realize the question is not asking me to consider their relevance to my own life. I’m just not sure how else to approach my tasks. 2 is how many graduate degrees I have. 7 is how many breakdowns. 2 is how many cats. Also, brothers. 7, the amount of nieces and nephews. They both have a single vowel in them. Both start with consonants from the latter half of the alphabet. Both are less than 10, which means poem-wise they’d be spelled out as opposed to the numeral. Unless I’m mistaken about that, which is both possible and likely. They’re numbers, he tells me. Tim Raymond works as a barista in South Korea. His writing has appeared recently or will appear in Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and CRAFT, among other publications. Find his comics and stories on Instagram at @iamsitting. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Autism Evaluation”? “Autism Evaluation” is from a collection of poems I’m writing called Kelly Walsh in Paradise, which is a phrase from a novel I’m writing called Alice Fisher, which is autistic and gender-fluid like I am. I’d been wanting to write about the evaluation process for ASD because I think it’s so ripe for play with language and inversions. I’m convinced actually that the content of the questions and statements in the evaluation’s various components matters less than the nature of the respondent’s answers—whether they ask for qualifications, or go silent, or info-dump, or contradict themselves intentionally for the sake of thoroughness, for I think maybe the quintessential autistic experience is imagining what else could or might be. Anyway, I didn’t know how to write the 2 and 7 poem until I was browsing JCCA and realized I could go the prose poem route, and just forget the line breaks altogether and compress everything. Thank you, JCCA. by Meg Eden In eighth grade, Kevin Hannigan pointed at each person in the class and said, “May you be anathema!” We weren’t allowed damn and shit and hell, but none of the teachers complained about his application of systematic theology in conversation. At lunch, he’d ask to sit with the teachers, but even they found better things to do, their excuses thin and wafer-like. The rest of us learned how to look out the window when he asked us questions, an art I never fully mastered. The teachers would always pair me up with him, thinking I was kinder than the rest. But I wasn’t. I was only quieter. I don’t want to say it was because he was Catholic in a Protestant school—it wasn’t. As much as Anna argued for Calvinism at recess, the rest of us were just trying to pass. We wanted to survive. A year later, half of us went to public schools, where our best friends damned us on the bus and on the way to class, and we were supposed to be the light that shined without earthly reason, without reward. Meg Eden teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” and children’s novels including a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Wall” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Private School”? I start writing in what I know, mining my memories and experiences. I think as someone who believes in heaven and hell, the transition from private school to public school came as a particular shock in how casually we use phrases like damn in American culture. But as I mined my memories, I remembered a kid who sort of got around this by using anathema instead. So these worlds that I thought were so different were maybe not as different as I thought. There’s an ironic humor to this, but also it struck me with a challenge. Thinking about the way scripture challenges believers to be “lights” in the world, not conforming but transforming the world around us by choosing what is good, writing this poem made me wonder: am I really living a good different kind of life? Am I choosing radical love and joy, or am I choosing to imitate and be safe? by Carlin Katz The VHS tape stutters back to life: cicada drone and the summer-crisped backyard of my childhood. Adults wander into the frame with sweating beer bottles and bowls of pretzels. A solitary donkey dances in her paper dress at some cousin’s birthday party. All of us kids line up and take a turn with the bat. I’m the eldest child, so I have to wait. Each kid steps up and an aunt or uncle spins them, takes them by the shoulders, and aims them at their goal. Thunk of wooden bat against cardboard. The piñata careens like an untamed thing on her thin tether. I step up to take my turn and look around to see who will spin me, but the adults have lost interest. I am watching my 10-year-old self: skinny knees, too-serious. I try to reach her, this flickering shadow: steady now, I’m here with you. But I am eager for my chance to swing. And with no one to pull the blindfold down over my eyes, I do it myself. I jerk, head-down, whirling myself silently in a crazy circle, and without warning I head off in the wrong direction. Blind, I knock the daylights out of little Andy from next door. I lift the bandana and blink at my forfeit prize as the adults hurry to tend to the dazed child. My family pauses and rewinds the tape, laughing. They want to watch it again. But in my mind, the frame is frozen on that little girl—unbalanced and alone with a weapon in her hand. Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and writer living with her family and an anxious dog on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. She loves wordplay and cracking up. You can find her in the woods. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Piñata Memory”? As the mom of a 10-year-old, and as a person undergoing her own late initiation into true adulthood, I very often think about rites of passage and the lack of meaningful rituals for entering adolescence in mainstream White American culture. Even in a loving and well-intentioned family like mine, most young people of the dominant culture are left clumsily wielding their own power with very little guidance or elder-ing. We long to be woven into the great nexus of meaning and purpose and that we are born to as children of the living world. This yearning was made conscious for me the moment I saw myself in this home movie, spinning myself around and around. On a lighter note, I considered titling this piece “Andy Gets His” because I find it funny that this was the actual title someone wrote on the VHS tape—as if the child in question deserved to get clonked on the head with a hollow bat. Which, of course, he did not.
Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant
Autism Evaluation
CNF: Private School
CNF: Piñata Memory
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD